Creme de la crème
A. N. Wilson
FAIRNESS by Ferdinand Mount Chatto, £16.99, pp. 306, ISBN 0701169753
Reviewers are not supposed to give away the plot of crime stories, but I forget what the form is when reviewing romans fleuves. Some would say you were in luck if such books had a plot. Fairness does have a plot; a very neat one. It is the latest of Ferdinand Mount's haunting 'Chronicle of Modern Twilight' series, and Gus Cotton
— son of The Man Who Rode Ampersand — looks back at the life and career of Helen Hardress, whom he first meets when they are students doing summer jobs in France looking after the children of some rich Americans, and whom we last see . . . should I tell you? I don't think I'd better, but think Virginia Bottomley, think Margaret Jay. ...
For anyone who has not read any of the earlier books in the sequence, this doesn't matter a bit, It is not a sequence like A Dance to the Music of Time, but a set of related tales, more comparable in structure to Balzac's Comedie Humaine. In fact, their structure is more circular than linear. Each volume, though harking back to the past, returns to the (or a) present. The Man Who Rode Ampersand goes back to the pre-war days before Gus's slightly melancholy, understated existence, and recreates the colourful world of his father's career as a gentleman-jockey. Fairness takes us back to — oh, the Fifties, I should say. and works forward to the present. It is fun working out how much Helen was figuring in Gus's life during the latter stages of Ampersand. But if you are not yet a Mount aficionado, don't worry: these are all novels which stand in their own right. You don't have to have read the earlier ones, but your enjoyment of them is enhanced if you recognise the characters from other books stepping into the pages. For addicts. I should perhaps say that there is a marvellous resurfacing here of Dr Maintenon-Smith from Of Love and Asthma: and Froggie O'Neill who in The Man Who Rode Ampersand asks us to believe that he is bandaged from head to toe because he fell through a conservatory roof in the course of an athletic piece of adultery, appears here as the judge in a distressing inquiry into a case of child abuse. (I still laugh aloud when I think of Froggie, also a jockey with Harry Cotton, taking off his socks to reveal to the amazed stable-boys that his nails have been painted bright red).
The latest book, like the earlier ones, compels the reader by a sneakily-elaborate story. (Boiled down, it is that every character in the book, however unlikely, turns out not merely to have seen, but to have enjoyed tiny blonde Helen's charms — except the diffident Gus, of course, who loves her.) Helen is described by the blurb rather bafflingly as 'a female Candide for our time'. I must re-read Voltaire. I had forgotten that Candide gets off with every other character in the book, drifts into alcoholism, and is a blonde bombshell whom some people would describe as Trouble with a capital T. Helen is all these things, a pocket Venus whose take on the world is hard to grasp. Whether she turns up as a scientific adviser to a very dodgy American mining operation in Central Africa, or as a demonstrator on a picket line during the Three Day Week; or as a miserable young mother drinking herself silly in a cottage miles from anywhere, or as a social worker in a child-abuse case, she seems to demonstrate the same double quality. On the one hand, she herself is almost detached from the chaos surrounding her; and on the other, because of the tendency of most men to fall in love with her, she is partly the agent of the chaos, though she is never manipulative. This is a book which has very many funny moments, but it is not a light-hearted story. There are two chillingly well described suicides (the first being Helen's own father — a marvellous character). And there is nearly a third, as the narrator lies in bed wondering whether to kill himself.
Yet, as I have hinted, Helen survives, she even triumphs by marrying the most absurd of civil servants — Gus's superior — and by being given a life peerage.
Gus Cotton himself is a much more fascinating character than the aloof Nick Jenkins in the Anthony Powell sequence. His vision of life, human character, England, love, are hauntingly constipated, funny-sad, wistful. His most satisfactory sexual moments in the book involve — without being too blunt — hand relief. Though heart-broken by Helen, he cannot commit himself to the emotional rough and tumble which seems to be required. He seems most himself when making melancholy (though of course unbelieving) visits to St Col's, the bleak urban church of one of Helen's fathers-in-law (he's the Rev Mr Moonman, dad of the slightly Ingrams-like editor of a scurrilous satirical mag) or when surveying the industrial wastelands of outer Birmingham. He is least at ease when finding himself involved emotionally. One of the most excruciating leitmotifs of the book is his relationship with his rich American employer. At the beginning of the book, when Gus is looking after her son, she seduces him (not the whole way, as I have indicated). She then mistakenly imagines him to be unfaithful, and a Fatal Attraction-style revenge of hatred and ghastly embarrassment pursue Gus for years afterwards. Does he quite see the part he himself played in all this? Probably. Everything is contingent in Mount's imaginative world, every vision is capable of revision. He is a deep, subtle writer, and if you have not read his novels before, I can only urge you to do so. He is much the best English novelist of his generation, and Fairness is his best novel yet.
Previous page
